[potency]

Careful, if too many people start thinking like this reddit's entire business model built on free labor collapses.

[Gigachad]

Reddit mods largely aren’t doing it for nothing. They are doing it for social power and the ability to control the conversation for communities.

Just think about what it means to be top mod of a cities subreddit. You can trivially just delete conversations you don’t like.

[heisenbit]

Or you can get great conversations going, help struggling strangers get up and become pillars of their communities. Which sometimes requires deleting snarking comments, ban aggressive repeat rule offenders and deal with occasional personal attacks.

Moderators have powers, use power and are often not at liberty to reveal all what went into their decisions. Moderation on any scale is however a team effort and is then subject to scrutiny, discussion and review. Power tripping moderators will be removed by the team and in communities with a sole moderator who is on a power trip it will not thrive.

[dzikimarian]

Everybody is free to setup their own forum on phpBB or whatever, however they keep choosing reddit. Ever wondered why?